Winter Sun
by alectheta
Summary: How did Scully and Mulder end up celebrating Scully's birthday in Tempus Fugit (s04ep17)?
1. Chapter 1

Scully raised her gaze from the cellphone she'd been turning over in her hands for the past two minutes. It had become usus that when she put it into the bag at her feet, Mulder would look up from whatever he was doing and would ask her "You goin' home?"

Today, he was sitting across from her, behind his desk - _his_ desk - so engrossed in a file that he didn't seem to be aware of her still being here, and even less that she was about to leave. While she waited for him to say something, anything, or to even just look up, she watched the vein in his neck pulse. Counted. 76. A rather high heart rate, given he'd been sitting here for at least ten minutes. Apparently, the case file wasn't only captivating, but also exciting. If she vanished right this moment, he wouldn't even notice.

When she'd come down here after returning from a fruitless trip to the bureau's library, he'd been standing in front of an open cabinet on the wall behind his desk. Scully hadn't been able to see what he'd held in his hand - it must have been something small - but the way he'd been looking down at it had made her curious. The buoyant mania she'd come to expect from him in relation to any evidence not yet explainable by science had been absent. Mulder had appeared thoughtful and earnest, but his gaze had been affectionate. Scully had a sudden precognition that whatever he was holding in his hand was personal. She hadn't been prepared for the sinking feeling which caused her to stop in her tracks with her hand still on the door handle.

She'd wanted to vent to him about the old bat at the library, who had refused to rent out the set of medical textbooks Scully had found in the list of archived books to her because "You guys bunker those books down in that basement and never bring them back." Arguing with her that she wasn't "them" hadn't gotten her anything but a disdainful stare from over the rim of the old librarian's glasses and Scully had struggled not to laugh at the woman, whose leathery skin and magnified eyes had reminded her of a very old, very unhappy tortoise.

Then she'd remembered why she'd come here in the first place and had seen the literature research she'd planned on getting done over the weekend go down the drain due to yet another unhelpful government employee. When she'd stepped into the elevator and had seen the button for the basement, trading barbs with Mulder about the people working above ground level had seemed like a good idea to let off steam. Her partner had a long-running feud with Mrs. Hall, who'd banned him from the library for supposedly ripping articles out of newspapers. Back when Scully had confronted him, he'd insisted, with a very straight face, he'd never do anything the like while he'd tried to cover the pile of newspaper clippings scattered across his desk with the pages of the travel expense form he'd been filling out.

She'd counted on his dry humor to lighten her mood, yet after seeing him standing in front of the cabinet as he came to a decision and closed his hand around the item he'd taken from it, she'd felt like an intruder. She'd been about to close the door and leave, but Mulder had turned around and had smiled at her.

"There you are! I thought you'd already left."

He'd seemed happy to see her, even relieved, but also... nervous? As he'd walked over to his desk, he'd buried his hand and whatever he'd concealed in it in the pocket of his pants. Then he'd sat down and had grabbed a case file from the stack to his right, and her chance to find out what it was that seemed to have such a special meaning to him had vanished.

They had been sitting across from each other in silence ever since. Scully had perused the office supplies and knick-knacks on Mulder's desk. A lone white pencil of mysterious origin stuck out from the bunch of ordinary orange pencils Mulder always kept on hand. Next to it, a tear-off calendar showed today's date.

February 21st, 1997.

Two days until her birthday. One day and a bit, since it was almost five in the afternoon. 16:56pm, to be exact. She'd checked the watch on her phone every time the awkwardness of staring at Mulder and his desk had overpowered her.

The title page he'd lifted only enough so he was able read the report beneath had the usual red frame around it. Any comfort she'd come to draw from the familiar appearance of an X-File went up in flames as it turned into her red flag. She was preparing to go home for the weekend, and he didn't notice because of one of those damn files. Her birthday was going to be on Sunday, and he hadn't taken any note of that either.

She didn't know why it made her so angry this time around. He'd never remembered her birthday, not once in four years. Not even her thirtieth. This was her thirty-third, and might also... she cut off her thoughts right there. She couldn't help herself if she wasn't thinking clearly, and only treating her situation the way an investigator would was holding her together.

Of course, this piece of advice had to have come from Mulder. He was chewing on an orange pencil as if his life depended on it, oblivious to her on the other side of his desk. The tenacity she'd admired in him from the moment they'd met was reassuring when it was directed at herself and infuriating when it absorbed so much of his attention that he became blind even to his friends.

* * *

Mulder pretended to be taking in every single word of the file in his hands. If anyone had asked him about its content, he'd have been able to rattle off all the normal and paranormal events referenced in it. Not because he'd been reading the report just now, but because he'd been familiar with it for years.

He'd rested his left ankle on his right thigh, because he was pretty sure he sat that way when he was relaxed. Through the thin fabric of his suit pants, the cool piece of metal in his pocket burned like ice. Over the top of the pages he'd lifted just far enough so it appeared like he was reading, he saw Scully come to some sort of decision. Since he'd wasted the couple of minutes she'd spent sitting across from him in silence and turning her phone over in her hand as if she were wringing someone's neck, he'd have to ask her now.

Right this very moment.

Or never.

He'd imagined this scene over and over since he'd first had the idea a week ago. Last night, the rhythmic sound of the bubbles rising in the fish tank behind his head had again provided the metronome for the infinite vortex of his thoughts.

Scully was sick. He refused to accept she might die soon, but what if she did? What if their shared path ended before another one of her birthdays came around? Anything they might be hoping for or dreaming of, gone before they were able to reach out for it. Only what was in their past couldn't be taken from them.

He'd decided to turn some of the tentative dreams he'd had for the far future into memories made now. Choosing a date was easy, as was picking up the phone and making the necessary arrangements.

Getting Scully to come there was the hard part. Oh, he knew he'd get an answer if he asked her outright. But what if he'd been wrong? What if all she wanted was to cling to normalcy, as far as there had ever been any for her since she'd been assigned to the X-Files? Normalcy, for them, was his complete lack of acknowledgement of any of her birthdays. He hadn't done it on purpose, they'd just been so occupied with cases each year. Well, he had been. But Scully had never complained. She had never mentioned his birthday either.

What if all she wanted was to keep it that way, the way things had always been?

This train of thoughts biting its own tail had prevented him from asking her about her plans for Sunday night. Some more observation of her behavior, he'd told himself every day, would make the preferred course of action clear.

Today was Friday, and his last chance.

He peered at Scully over the file. She was seething. He had no idea why, since neither of them had said a word in the past fifteen minutes. Mulder had been peering at his wristwatch out of the corner of his eye, watching the hands draw closer to Scully's usual clock out time with every passing heartbeat.

He was running out of time.

Even if she shot him down - not in the literal sense of the word, he hoped, not again - he'd know. He'd have tried, and he could live with that. Mulder took the pencil out of his mouth and leaned forward on his chair.

* * *

Enough was enough. Scully was never quite sure when Mulder was teasing her and when he meant what he said - or didn't say, for that matter - but if he had been trying to wind her up, he'd not only succeeded, but missed the moment where it stopped being funny and made her furious instead.

While staring at him as it would will him to acknowledge her, she grabbed her open handbag from the floor and tossed the cellphone into it. It landed on her keys with a loud clatter as the front legs of Mulder's chair hit the ground. If looks could kill, he'd have toppled over, but he was still frowning at the file in his hands.

Scully was sure he believed there was some kind of monster which was able to do that - kill you with a simple look. At the moment, she was inclined to agree with him.

It was also the only common ground between them right now.

She wanted to be seen as a person. Oh, did Mulder ever want to see, but not mere earthlings like herself. Those were only interesting if they were part of a case. She was at the center of one, and he was on it like a bloodhound. Scully was thankful for that as an agent and as a doctor, however, she was also more than that. Even people like her, who held science over most of their beliefs, had feelings and needed to be noticed, known, and understood.

In short, she was forlorn, and the path ahead of her would only get darker and even more lonely.

She couldn't allow her fears to weaken her spirit, so she held onto her anger with everything she had. Mulder couldn't have missed that she'd packed up her things.

With the bag in a stranglehold in one hand, she stood. Even drawing a breath was hard in the corset of her tense muscles.

* * *

The concentrated fury with which Scully had gathered up her things had knocked the courage out of Mulder. He was confused. What was going on with her? He peered up at his partner - and looked into chilling gray-blue eyes which were ready to kill.

Averting his gaze was a reflex he'd never encountered when face to face with monsters of all kinds, but the five feet and three inches of anger in front of his desk had succeeded where each of them had failed. In an attempt to brush over his trepidation, Mulder laid down the pencil and grabbed a sunflower seed from the small pile next to his phone. He bit it open and mumbled around it: "So, you're goin' home?"

"Does it look like I am?"

He dared to glance up at her, the thumb and the index finger of his right hand still stuck between his teeth. Smooth, Mulder, he told himself and scrambled to pick the hull out of his mouth so he could speak.

"Well, yes, Scully, that's what one assumes if someone is packing up their stuff and getting up from their desk," he said and threw the hull on the growing pile next to the his coffee mug.

"This isn't my desk. I don't have a desk, in case you are still not aware of that."

Mulder realized that today, saving himself with a joke was not an option. Scully was in a worse mood than he'd thought. Given her situation, it shouldn't have been surprising, but she'd held up so well ever since she'd recovered from the treatment she'd received in the hospital that they spent most days as if nothing had ever changed. He had been so glad she'd come back to work, and falling into their old routine had been a tad too easy.

They both pretended the thin ice above the dark abyss they were crossing would hold as well as the solid earth which had been pulled out under them only two short weeks ago when they'd learned about Scully's cancer.

Neither of them mentioned the tremors the extending cracks sent through their feet. They'd held onto each other when the ground gave in for the first time, and now that the cold water was lapping at their feet, Mulder did his best to talk over the creaking of the straining ice.

"So, what are you going to do over the weekend?" he asked and arranged the seeds into a neat square between four yellow pencils.

* * *

Scully had first hoped, then waited for this question since she'd first stepped into the office this morning. Here it was, and yet it did nothing to quench her burning anger. She wanted to let it go, but she found she couldn't.

Wasn't it unjust of her to snap at Mulder when he said what she'd wanted to hear all day?

With effort, she managed to release some of the tension in her shoulders. She intended to maintain some semblance of civility, but as she spoke, bitter sarcasm arose from the fire that kept her going.

"Oh, you know, the usual... take a bath, read. Enjoy how quiet it is in the apartment."

Be lonely, be scared, and waste a weekend that should create memories worth remembering - if not by her, then by those that shared them with her - , she thought to herself. The unfairness that Mulder could just go on with his life made her furious.

With jerky movements, she picked up her blazer from the back of her chair, folded it in half, and chucked it over her arm.

"See you on Monday," she said as she stalked towards the hallway, her voice heavy with barely concealed irritation.

" _Fox_ ," she added under her breath and slammed the door shut behind her.

* * *

Mulder sat at his desk, his hand hanging in midair. Openmouthed, he stared at the door. The bang reverberated once and then ebbed off as the files and newspaper clippings stacked in every corner of the office sucked all energy out of the sound. However, it still echoed in Mulder's mind once the room had gone back to the soulless silence it exuded in slow, stifling waves whenever he was alone down here.

He'd blown his chance. Scully wasn't in the mood to be around anyone, but it was clear he was number one on the list of people she didn't want to spend even a minute of her weekend with. They might have managed to have a casual conversation if he hadn't waited a whole week to bring up a topic which didn't have to do with an X-File. Maybe he would have been able to weave the question about her weekend plans into that conversation. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe in a parallel universe, he had succeeded, but in this one, he'd failed.

Mulder picked up one of the pencils and threw it at the door with as much force as he could muster. It clattered against the laminated pressboard, then fell down. He stared at the lonely orange fleck in a sea of gray government-issued carpet as if he expected it to come alive. The silence pressed in on him, and nothing moved. A sudden need to get out of the stuffy basement and to breathe some fresh air overcame him. He put on his coat, stepped over the pencil, and made his way to the elevator.

* * *

The words on the page dissolved into a gray blur in front of Scully's eyes. In a small, dark corner of her soul, her conscience had raised its unwelcome head while she'd been on the way to the university's library in the tense and aggressive atmosphere of Friday evening traffic.

Mulder hadn't done anything warranting her behavior towards him.

Exactly. He hadn't done anything. He'd only pretended everything was as it had always been, while they both knew everything had changed. Wasn't that just the point?

Someone had honked behind her, and in her hurry to cross the intersection before the light turned red again, she'd stalled the car. When she'd made it to the other side, but the guy behind her hadn't and it had been her fault, she felt as if she failed everyone she came in touch with. Was this what sickness did to people - did it suck their humanity out of them long before it took their life?

She'd pushed those bleak thoughts aside, which became easier every day, just as they became more and more frequent. They assaulted her out of the blue, like hawks swooping down on their unsuspecting prey. A happy couple passed her on the sidewalk on her way to lunch, and she thought she would never get to experience what they assumed to be nothing but their ordinary life. Someone walked their dog, and instead of giving its owner a smile, she was reminded she would never be a dog owner ever again. When she saw kids on a playground, she wished she could wipe her irrational anger at their mothers away like she blinked the tears out of her eyes. It became too much, and she learned to lie to herself that everything was fine, even if she was only able to convince herself of it for a few minutes before reality intruded.

Scully had taken the steps to the library entrance two at a time just to prove to herself that she was able to do so. The sun had set, and the glowing yellow light spilling through the high glass doors had made her feel more welcome than the purpose of her visit had warranted. The way to the section where the medical textbooks stood had still been familiar, and three aisles down she had found the authors starting with the letter R. The books she'd been looking for had had their place in the uppermost row, and she'd had to drag the stepladder from the beginning of the aisle to the dark corner where it ended to get to them. The first volume of "Nasal Tumors in Animals and Man" had stuck to the neighboring books before it had come free and had sent a flock of dust bunnies down on her that had made her sneeze. Scully had frozen with the back of her hand pressed to her nose until she'd been sure that the sudden pressure hadn't started yet another nosebleed. She'd had to leave her handbag in a locker and hadn't had a tissue on her. If she'd bled on the books, she'd have lost access to this library as well, but her life depended on the literature she found on her condition.

She'd piled the other two volumes of the series, Tumor Pathology and Experimental Carcinogenesis, onto the first one, and had climbed down the ladder step by step in her impractical heels. The student temp who'd had the evening shift at the counter had rented the books out to her with the bored routine of someone who had many more hours in the quiet library ahead of her. Scully had stepped out into the dark, cold February night much earlier than she'd anticipated. On her drive home, the sweet-and-sour scent of decaying paper had permeated the car, mixed with years of dust and the chemical odor of the decade-old plastic dust jackets. As soon as she'd gotten home, she'd changed into a loose, comfortable top and pajama bottoms and had settled on the couch for a first skim. She would have much preferred some lighter reading in her free time, but the enemy who'd had taken up residence within her had no concept of evenings or weekends. It was always, always growing. If she wanted to get ahead of it, she needed to learn everything about her cancer's likely and even unlikely causes in as little time as possible so she could turn that knowledge against it.

She'd only planned on leafing through the three volumes before dinner to get her bearings and to make a list of the topics covered that seemed most relevant to her case, but then she wasn't able to put the third book down. It talked about the known ways to induce nasal tumors, and she couldn't help but wonder if one of the described methods had been used on her. The expression made her cringe, because it exposed with clinical ruthlessness that she'd been the victim of a process she'd never consented to.

To get the thought out of her mind, she went back to the index listing all the experimental methods described in the book, hoping to remember anything that would help her discern which one she'd been subjected to. She read through all the chapter titles, but not a single memory or flashback came to her. Her mind took her down the well-traveled path they followed whenever she was working on an X-File with Mulder and she hadn't been able to come up with a scientific theory that made sense of the evidence at hand: she found herself going through all the out-of-the-ordinary explanations she could think of off the top of her head without Mulder there. To her chagrin, they were plentiful.

Of course, there was always that one explanation that her partner believed to be true - the one she found most unlikely. In the silence of her living room, she admitted to herself that she rejected even thinking about the possibility of an alien abduction. If her illness was the result of an unearthly procedure, there might not be an earthly cure for her condition. Out of mere self-preservation, she couldn't let herself consider that. She was only able to keep the darkness at bay if there was a possibility of recovery, no matter how slim.

* * *

Mulder wondered why an action he performed every day felt so different all of a sudden: as if his perception had shifted enough to make everything feel foreign and strange, but not enough that he didn't recognize his surroundings. When he turned the key in his apartment door, the clanging of metal and the snapping of the lock appeared to be louder and more piercing than usual, as if to alert everyone on his floor to his presence. In contrast to the office, where the emptiness had screamed at him after Scully had left, his apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator. He shut the door behind himself, leaned against it, and breathed a sigh of relief. The wood at the back of his head and his shoulders was cool and solid. If there were only something or someone to prop up his soul like the door did his body.

He pushed himself upright and took his coat off. What a futile habit to put it on the coat rack every night only to take it down again the next morning. What a futile life, chasing something that was always just out of reach or only seemed clear-cut and obvious to himself and no one else. How self-absorbed of him to pull Scully into all that without ever considering any of the dangers beyond those they'd been taught to watch out for during their FBI training.

If he'd still been leaning against the door, he'd have banged his head against it in yet another useless attempt to silence the cacophony of thoughts in his head. No matter what he tried to distract himself with - what to have for dinner, tonight's TV program, that he needed to feed the fish - he always ended up blaming himself for Scully's illness. Although he was ready to do whatever it took to help her, guilty or not, he wasn't able to focus on how to do that as long as his conscience was busy trying to assign guilt to someone. Especially since the alternatives to him were either beings from outer space or an evil government conspiracy that no one but he himself believed in.

Mulder stood in the middle of the kitchen, halfway between the pantry and the refrigerator, and couldn't bring himself to open either of them. His stomach had been rumbling on the way home, but now his appetite was gone. As he turned to leave, his gaze fell on the bottle of vodka in the far corner of the counter. Dust had settled on it and muted the gloss of the silver letters on the label to a dirty grey. It had stood there, unnoticed, for weeks, if not months, waiting for its moment.

Maybe the time had come.

There was no one around to talk him out of it. No one he could call who would dissect his motivations. No one who'd fire off an explanation, point by well-researched, fact-supported point, as to why it would be much better, from a scientific perspective, if he didn't try to drown his sorrows in alcohol.

So he had to play that part himself. Drinking on an empty stomach wasn't a good idea. Given how rarely he drank alcohol, it would hit him like a brick.

Maybe it was a good idea.

Maybe he was useless at scientific explanations.

* * *

Eight o'clock. There was still more than enough time left to read some chapters of the three books that lay scattered across the coffee table. Dinner could wait a little longer, Scully wasn't hungry. She seldom was. At the end of many of the evenings she'd spent at home since being diagnosed, she'd gone to bed without eating anything. She often lay in bed watching the scrubs in front of the bedroom window sway in the gusts of winter wind until there were only two or three hours left before she had to get up again. That left far too much time to follow her thoughts wherever they took her in the cold light of the street lamp which gave the branches slapping against the glass an eerie silver glow. Their shadows seemed to reach out for her across the empty right half of the bed with long, dark fingers.

The pale moonlight reminded her of another, much brighter, cold and clinical light. She couldn't remember much of her... experience. If she could only forget the parts that came back to haunt her. Yet, the more details she recalled, the better her chances were at saving herself.

Scully pressed a hand to her forehead and exhaled. She was glad she'd gone back to work. It gave her the impression that she was carrying on with her life, that there was going to be more life to live ahead of her. However, keeping up a professional front was draining. By the time she got home after a long day, she was often glad that she could show her fear and growing desperation without raising any questions by colleagues or prompting worried looks from Mulder.

Head in hand, she stared down at the carpet without seeing anything and wiped her mind blank of any thoughts. After a few blissful seconds, the now familiar dread returned, and she collected herself and stood to get a notepad and a pen.

* * *

With the dusty bottle in one hand and the TV remote in the other, Mulder plopped down on the couch and put his feet up on the coffee table. He switched on the TV, dropped the remote next to him, and screwed the lid off the liquor.

He'd forgotten to bring a glass.

Fumes of alcohol shot up his nose and went straight to his head when he took a generous whiff of the vodka. No way was he going to drink that straight from the bottle.

There was an open jug of orange juice in the fridge, but no clean glass anywhere in the kitchen. Mulder considered pouring the vodka into the jug, but that seemed a bit crass. From the living room, a chipper, high-pitched male voice was advertising some gadget that, according to the commercial, "Programs your cells for health using the latest in computer technology. This is a special offer, only $49.99, only available for a limited amount of time. Call right now and hold the key to your health in your hands by tomorrow!" Mulder believed in many things, but even he didn't think that a random piece of technology could heal all ills and snorted in disgust. If it only were this easy. After rummaging through the cupboards for a while, he found a mug behind some dishes that he never used, since he only recycled the one standing in the dish rack next to the sink. The faded print on the mug said, "We solve your problems!" And, smaller underneath, "SampSolv - Your trusted source for analytical-grade solvents." Baffled, he held it up in front of him. Then, he remembered: almost three years ago, before the X-Files had been shut down for a while, the bag of sunflower seeds he'd been about to take out of his desk drawer had ripped open. The seeds had rained down on his paperwork and from there on his legs and down on the floor, but Scully had grabbed a mug she'd kept at the basement office and had emptied the remaining contents of the broken bag into it. Up in the lab, they sometimes got little gifts from the sales representatives of the companies they ordered their medical and chemical supplies from, and the mug had been one of them. When they'd had to leave the X-Files office, he'd taken it home with him, since it had still held what had been left of his snack.

Armed with the mug and the orange juice, Mulder returned to the living room as a wildlife documentary came on. He poured a generous helping of vodka into the glass and topped it off with the juice. Then he sat back, put his feet back up on the coffee table and took a large swig of the mixture. The cold orange juice froze his brain, but then the alcohol hit and a welcome warmth spread in his mind and slowed his thoughts.

For a moment, anyway. He took another big swallow.

There, that was better.

But not good enough.

* * *

Scully heard herself wheeze in the quiet living room. The carpet around her was speckled with tissues from when she'd tried in vain to free up her stuffy nose. She took a deep breath through the mouth and kept reading. So far, she'd skimmed through the chapters providing general information on nasopharyngeal tumors. She was looking for something new to catch her eye, an opening to another avenue of research to pursue, so she kept leafing through the first book. The rustling of the pages made her think of fall, and she wondered if she'd survive long enough to see the leaves turn yellow, red, and brown again. Then she shook her head at herself. She was an FBI agent, she'd been in severe danger before and had still always assumed that she'd live to celebrate another Christmas, another birthday. She forced herself to snap out of her self-pity and the book and the notepad lying on the coffee table came back into focus. So far, she'd only written down the three conventional ways of treatment: chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. The latter was out of the question, since the cure would be as dangerous as the disease. That left the other two. Based on her knowledge from med school, she'd concluded that neither of them were a viable option either for her type of carcinoma, and that's what she'd told Mulder when she'd shared the discovery of her illness with him.

Only with him.

She'd been on autopilot from the moment when she'd first seen the image of her tumor, an innocent white patch in an amalgamation of grey. That the name and birthdate printed at the foot of the radiogram had been hers had given a surreal situation the hard-hitting stamp of reality. In a split second, she'd turned from an examining doctor into the patient being examined. Then, the automatisms from both her medical and her FBI training had taken over, and she'd called the partner she trusted with her life. In the time it had taken him to make his way to the hospital, she'd gone through everything she could recall about the types and treatments of nasal tumors before she'd had to break the bad news to him.

After the numbness of the initial shock of finding her worst fears confirmed had worn off, she'd been able to contain the rising tide of panic by slipping back into her doctor's persona. Scully had wanted to stay strong while she informed Mulder. Having to tell him that he would most likely lose another person from his life had been something she'd rather not have had to do, and breaking down herself while doing so would have turned this journey neither of them wanted to be on into a direction she didn't want to imagine herself going into.

While she'd thought about the best way of presenting him with the grim facts, she'd wondered how she was even able to worry about someone else's feelings when her own world had just been hurled into darkness. The second detail marking the change in how people treated her had been the fact that Mulder had brought her flowers. The first had been the shift in the demeanor of the imaging technician. When Scully had arranged the examination and the technician had assumed it was for one of "Dr. Scully's" patients, she'd sounded upbeat and perky. Later, she'd been taken aback when she'd found out that the appointment had been for Scully herself, but she'd recovered and had put on a professional mask while she readied the equipment. Afterwards, when she'd pinned the prints to the wall in the stark white conference room where Scully had been shivering in her flimsy hospital dress, she'd said, "I'm sorry, Dr. Scully," her face carefully devoid of any signs that there might be joy in her own life. Then she'd closed the door behind herself with great care, as if to shut out the normal life still going on outside the cancer ward.

Scully shook her head in an attempt to return to the present. Ever since she'd diagnosed herself, her thoughts had been going off on odd tangents in the most inappropriate moments, and often, her feelings had followed. She couldn't let herself drift like this if she was going to find a way to treat herself in time. She sat up from her slouch, blew her nose, pulled the coffee table closer, poised the pen over the notepad and found her place in the book where her mind had wandered off.

* * *

Partners were supposed to protect each other, to have each other's backs. He'd failed Scully. Not only had he not protected her, he was the one who'd exposed her to what had made her sick. If it hadn't been for him and his crazy quest, she'd never have been assigned to the X-Files to reign him in. He'd pulled her into the center of the conspiracy permeating every corner of his life and had turned hers upside down in the process - had maybe even exposed her to a deadly threat. Their weapons were useless against the kind of danger they were dealing with, and even Scully's faith hadn't been able to follow her to where she'd been taken.

Mulder swirled the rest of the tepid cocktail around in the mug and then poured it down his throat in one big gulp. The narrator's sonorous voice didn't match his agitation, and he flipped channels. More commercials. Next channel. Men in suits screaming at each other in a political talkshow. He hit the remote so hard it skipped a channel, and the tinny laugh track of a sitcom filled the room. He switched the TV off and grabbed the vodka bottle. This time, he poured double the amount. The orange juice lost most of its color when it combined with the alcohol. Mulder stared at the pale yellow concoction for a second, then shrugged his shoulders and took a gulp. He leaned back and rested his head against the wall. There was nothing to distract him at the ceiling, and he let it loll to the right side. One of the fish in the aquarium was facing him, and Mulder raised his mug to him before he took another sip.

* * *

She was parched. Scully swallowed, and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. With her mouth closed, she couldn't breathe, so she gulped in air like a fish on land. Her neck hurt, and she raised her head inch by inch against the stiffness of her muscles with her eyes still shut. Something stuck to her cheek, and it peeled off her skin like a plaster. A book snapped shut below her left ear, and she realized she must have fallen asleep over the books and her notes.

She opened her eyes and pushed her glasses up on her nose. The light in the kitchen was still on from when she'd come home, and she realized she hadn't eaten anything. The hands on her wristwatch indicated that she'd slept until almost 11pm. Scully contemplated rummaging through the fridge in search for something that would pass for dinner, but she was still dizzy with sleep. If that meant that she would for once be out like a light the moment her head hit the pillow, she didn't want to waste the opportunity.

Her leg had fallen asleep, and she stretched it out under the table and waited until the pricking of pins and needles abated before she got up. On the way to her bedroom, she yawned. Loudly. Living alone had its perks.

Scully hadn't looked forward to crawling under the covers this much in a long time. She tucked them under her arm, turned onto her side, and asked herself if there were any tissues left in the box on the nightstand in case her nose started bleeding during the night.

She was fast asleep before she could check.

* * *

"I screwed up today, Herman. Scratch that. I screwed up all week. I've screwed up my partner's life. Her future. She might not even have a future anymore."

Herman didn't respond.

Mulder wasn't deterred by the lack of communication. "You know, I was going to do something nice for her. But then I screwed up."

He burped. "I've told you that before, haven't I?" Mulder tried to count the bubbles rising in the fish tank. There were so many, and they multiplied before his eyes.

"Where was I? Right. It's her birthday on Sunday, and she's sick, and I really don't want to think about losing her, so I'm drinking. See? Now I've thought about it again."

He guzzled what was left over from his fourth helping and sat up to pour himself a new drink. His brain seemed to be sloshing back and forth in his skull, and his vision swayed in synchrony. He sat on the edge of the sofa until both settled down. Then, he grabbed the glass bottle and poured its contents into the jug of orange juice. Or rather, he tried. Only when the expected splashing sound didn't come did he realize that he'd forgotten to unscrew the cap. He huffed at himself, removed the obstacle to oblivion with unsteady fingers, and stuck the bottleneck into the jug.

Then he shook it to mix it all up. The contents splashed around in the plastic container, and some of the liquid shot up through the opening and doused his legs.

Figuring out the right order in which to react took him longer than usual, and by the time he'd decided to put the jug on the table and to get something to dab at the spreading stain, the cocktail had soaked through his suit pants. He got up, steadying himself with one hand on the armrest.

"Don't look, Herman," he said, turned his back to the aquarium and unfastened his belt. Working the button was difficult. Several times, he thought he'd managed to slide it through the hole, only to find out that his pants wouldn't budge when he tugged on them. When the button came free, they fell down, and Mulder collapsed on the sofa in his boxers.

"Where was I? Screwed up, right. All I had to do is ask her. By the way, her name is Scully, but you know that, don't you? She's been here before." He raised his head far enough so he could take a sip from the jug. No point in bothering with the mug.

He wiped his mouth and continued. "She's the only person I talk to, because I can't trust anyone. No one besides her, that is. But we never really talk, you know? I thought it would be nice if we did. So, we could go out for dinner, right? Birthday dinner. With sparklers and singin' Happy Birthday and all that. Proper birthday so she can forget for a bit. It's all set, we jus' need to show up. I jus' want her to be happy on her special day. Jus' a lil' smile. That would be nice." He stared at the ceiling while the scene played out in his mind. They'd have dinner... they'd had dinner together hundreds of times, but for once, they weren't going to talk about work. He wasn't going to bring up any cases, or the search for his sister. Scully had always imagined a different life for herself, and the realization that she might never get a chance to live her dreams had punched the air out of his lungs like a nightmare that he still hadn't woken up from. He would do anything to give her even a little bit of what she'd forgone in working with him. Normal people with normal lives had birthday dinners, and they gave each other birthday presents.

"I even have a present," he told Herman, who was standing still in the water, moving his fins just enough not to get carried away by the current. Mulder motioned towards the approximate location where his pants lay in a soaked, crumbled grey heap on the floor. "Keychain. Apollo 11. Because she's a s-scientist, and without them, mankind wouldn't ever have flown to the moon." He mimicked a rocket taking off towards space, and the liquid in the jug in his other hand splashed around. He pulled himself up and drank most of the sour, tepid mixture despite it burning his throat. "No asn... astronauts on the moon without scientists. And none in your fish tank either," he continued. "Scully is a damn fine scientist. Shoulda read her thesis. 'S really good. I've got a copy here somewhere." He got up on unsteady feet and staggered towards the desk.

* * *

A warm, fluffy cloud. Soft fabric against her skin, the mild air heavy with the scent of flowers. Sun on her face. Scully stretched her arms above her head and wiggled her toes. No alarm. The weekend! She smiled.

Saturday or Sunday?

She'd fallen asleep at the coffee table on Friday evening. And with that, her new, ugly reality caught up with her. The bright, sunny day promised joy which was lost on her.

She could just as well continue where she'd left off yesterday night. Scully heaved herself up and padded down the hallway.

The living room opened up in front of her, and she stopped dead in her tracks.

The coffee table was empty.

The books were gone, and her notepad wasn't there anymore either. Only the pen lay still on the table, but on the other side from where she'd left it.

The blood drained from her face, and then a wave of heat shot back up as the adrenaline hit. She should have been intimidated. They wanted her intimidated.

Whoever "they" were.

She balled her fists. She'd had it with people intruding into her life, into her apartment, into her body, into her health. With great effort, she contained her fury and listened.

Except for the rustling of the trees swaying in the breeze outside the window, the apartment was quiet. Scully traced her steps back to the bedroom. Gun in hand, she checked the closet, the other room, and then the hallway in front of her apartment.

She was alone.

Without any immediate danger, the adrenaline rush abated. Scully took a deep breath when her heart rate slowed, but the downward spiral continued and swept the defenses away that she'd kept in place for two weeks. She started shaking. When she turned to go back into the apartment, she found she couldn't step over the threshold.

She was standing in the hallway in her pajamas with her gun in her hand, staring into the living room through the wide open jaw of the apartment door, shivering and unable to move.

A neighbor opened a door, and the sound set her in motion. She needed to get out of here.

* * *

The light came from the wrong direction, and red heat pulsated behind his eyes in time with the pounding in his head. Mulder pried one eye open, and a flash of pain shot through his skull. He winced and burrowed his face... in a stack of paper. Careful, he opened both eyes. The letters at the end of his nose blurred together, so he raised his head a few inches until the word "universe" came into focus. Mulder straightened and read the whole sentence. "Although multidimensionality suggests infinite outcomes in an infinite number of universes, each universe can produce only one outcome."

Scully's thesis.

The words made their way through the haze in his mind and the sense behind them trickled into his consciousness. Only one outcome per universe.

The wrong outcome. Scully leaving in a huff. His bad mood. The drinking. Staggering to his desk.

He groaned. Time to get up and turn around to face whichever destruction he'd caused last night.

The chair stuck to the back of his thighs and fell over with a loud clatter when he stood. Mulder froze, shoulders hunched and eyes closed, until the bouncing and banging behind him abated.

Wait a minute.

Naked skin sticking to the chair.

He wasn't wearing any pants.

Mulder tried to recalled his steps backwards from when he'd walked to the desk. Once he remembered taking them off, he relaxed. He turned around to the heap of fabric on the floor by the sofa.

Then he shot forward, kneeled down next to his pants and searched their pockets.

Nothing. His heart began to race. Surely he'd searched the same pocket twice.

He checked again.

Left pocket.

Nothing there. However, he recalled putting the keychain in his right pocket when Scully had come down to the office, surprising him. He made sure to check that one again too.

The phone rang. Mulder ignored the shrill sound and kept searching.

The keychain wasn't there.


	2. Chapter 2

Whoever was trying to reach him wasn't willing to give up. The ringing of the phone registered only at the periphery of Mulder's mind, since he was focusing all his attention on looking for the keychain.

The answering machine started recording with a static noise, and a male voice which sounded far away and weirdly disembodied said: "Err... I, uh... I may have some information for you. Actually, it's for, uh, about someone close to you. So come alone if you're interested, and, frankly, I think you should be. Tomorrow afternoon. In Baltimore. You'll, um, you'll get the address from the information desk in Penn Station. A John Miller will leave an envelope for you there." After that, there was nothing but static for a few seconds, and then the answering machine clicked off.

Mulder wondered what this was about. Baltimore. Information about someone close to him.

The Johns Hopkins Hospital was in Baltimore. Did whoever had contacted him have information on Scully's illness? He needed to find out where the call had come from. Maybe he'd lost the keychain on his way home yesterday, and if he went back into the office, he could look for it there too. Mulder pulled a pair of jeans out of the dryer and, hopping on one leg at a time, put them on, grabbed his leather jacket and left for the FBI.

* * *

Scully avoided coming here during weekends. Today, however, she needed to be on the water, even if it meant being stuck on a river cruise boat with hordes of tourists. In her hurry to get out of her apartment, she'd grabbed the first clothes she'd seen in the closet. With her white trainers, rust colored t-shirt, green sweater, and beige coat, she would pass as a bemused tourist herself.

She couldn't have cared less. She was confused, and angry and overwhelmed on top of that.

After buying a ticket to the next cruise without bothering to ask where the boat was headed for, she was first in line to board the Matthew Hayes and cut straight to her favorite place at the bow. The unusually balmy breeze carried the stale odor of the murky green river water up to her. Scully stood with her hands on the railing, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The sun warmed her face, and the light seeping through her eyelids lifted her mood despite her situation still being the same. It was good to get away from it all, even if she knew this would only be a short reprieve before the darkness caught up with her.

She'd have to find out who had taken the books from her and why. Was there any information in them that would have brought her closer to a promising treatment? That cleared up the possible origins of her illness? Was whoever had stolen the books trying to harm her or to protect her?

Would Mulder do that - take those books to shield her from information which might make her try something he saw as reckless? She dismissed that possibility. He was the reckless one, and he hadn't been willing to accept that a cure might not exist.

Not that she'd come to terms with that herself, and as long as she hadn't, she would keep fighting and searching.

Would Mulder have removed the books to shield her from information that would upset her? She didn't have any idea what could possibly upset her more than finding out she had a fatal disease, but who knew what was going on in his head. She certainly didn't. Not at the moment.

Scully was so used to understanding Mulder without words, just from a single gaze or the tone of his voice, that Friday's interaction had left her mystified.

On a normal day, he talked and talked and talked from the moment she entered the office until they left for one of their investigative road trips. He rambled on, listing occurrences of certain unexplained phenomena for the past several decades, complete with the specific dates and a slideshow that didn't spare her any of the mostly unsavory details. Tried to convince her that a random concatenation of circumstances was actually an X-File. Countered her attempts at coming up with a scientifically sound explanation with even more observations from old case files.

He never just remained silent.

* * *

Of course he'd been called from a phone booth. In the middle of the city, no less. That didn't give him much to go on - anybody could have made the call to him.

Mulder thanked the poor tech guy who was stuck with the weekend shift, hung up and sighed while he leant back in his chair. To his left, specks of dust danced in the rays of sunshine coming in through the skylights.

Sometimes he wondered whether it was all worth it: sitting down here in the basement, surrounded by darkness creeping in from the edges, while most other people were outside enjoying their free time. Risking his own life, and that of his friend. That thought took him back to the keychain. It hadn't been in the car, so it had to be either here, or somewhere at home where he hadn't combed through yet.

Mulder got up and peered under the chair. Then, he let his gaze sweep over the floor under the furniture. He didn't see anything there, so he got out his flashlight and illuminated the dark corners under the cabinets. Except for several dust bunnies, he found nothing. Dammit, Mulder, he chastised himself as he brushed the lint off his knees, how could you lose something so important as Scully's birthday present. Why had he never given her anything before? He wanted to yell at his younger self to look up from his stacks of X-Files once in awhile. To take a look around and appreciate what he had.

He wanted to do better this year, wanted to use what might have been the only chance he had left. Mulder stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips and went through every place that he'd been to after he'd left the office the day before.

Hallway. He'd scanned the floor when he'd walked in, and it had been empty.

Car park. He'd gone to the spot where he'd parked yesterday before he came in here. Nothing there either.

Car. Not there.

The path leading up to the front door of the house. The old lady living on the first floor had thought he'd lost his keys when she'd come back from shopping and had found him in the front yard, staring at the ground. She'd even offered to let him in. Since she was nearly deaf, he hadn't succeeded at getting her to understand that he was leaving instead of trying to get to his apartment. In his desperation, he'd yelled in her ear: "I'm late! I have to go!"

She'd scowled up at him, her surprised, owlish eyes magnified by thick glasses, and had said: "Oh, why haven't you told me earlier that you're going on a date! I wouldn't have held you up like this if I'd known."

Mulder had stared at her for a second, then he'd realized this was his easiest opportunity to get out of there. He'd said, "Thank you, thank you very much!" And had run off.

"Enjoy your date!" the old lady had yelled after him in an astounding volume, given that she'd been about half his height and all bones and no flesh.

She couldn't have been more wrong about how he was going to spend his Saturday afternoon.

He couldn't do anything about the lost keychain now. It had to be somewhere in his apartment. Since he only needed to be in Baltimore until noon the next day, he had a free Saturday afternoon lying in front of him. Should he go outside, enjoy the sunny spring weather? Spend the day like a normal person? Socialize?

He fished his cellphone out of the jacket and was dialing Scully's number before he realized that he'd never even considered calling anybody else.

Or that she could still be angry at him.

* * *

The gentle rolling of the boat slowed the whirlwind in Scully's mind down to the timeless rhythm of the waves. She let the sound of the water rising and falling on either side of the bow wash over her, interspersed only by the melancholic cries of the seagulls soaring in the blue sky.

She had lost contact with her old acquaintances when she'd started to work at the FBI after med school, and her experiences with the X-Files had alienated her from even more people, including some family members. Still, she'd never been alone like this before. This new path, however, she had to walk on her own.

Scully swallowed as a big ball of loneliness rose up in her throat. The wind blowing into her face carried the tears away, and they became part of the spray. She took a deep breath and blinked.

Her cellphone rang, and she was yanked back to reality. When she turned away from the railing so her phone didn't end up in the water, she caught the tourists on the benches behind her eyeing her with disdain. She buried her nose in her handbag. As long as she was trying to dig down to the source of the noise, she could avoid acknowledging them.

Their thoughts couldn't have been more clear if they'd been yelling at her. What a snob. She thinks she's so important. She thinks if she can't be reached by phone for an hour, the world might end.

Little did they know.

Not that she enjoyed being in this position. At the moment, she despised it. Other people had lives. They went on cruises just for the fun. They went on holidays. With their families. They had families. Even if they didn't, they had a future.

At last, she got ahold of the phone and pulled it out of the bag.

Scully took a look at the name flashing on the display and didn't know whether to laugh or to cry at herself because she'd thought someone else but Mulder might be trying to reach her. A family member, maybe. Her mom, babying the only daughter she had left. Or her brother William, berating her for her choices.

Of course it wasn't either of them.

Of course it was him.

Taking Mulder's calls no matter where she was or whether the timing was acceptable or not had become an unconscious reflex. Today, she stopped herself from accepting the call out of mere habit and hesitated with her thumb hovering above the green button.

Why hadn't being at Mulder's beck and call annoyed her this much before? They were partners, and they depended on each other when they were working on a case. She was fine with that. But why did he seem to think he could just run off after one of his crazy theories without letting her know up front, only to demand her help as soon as he found something - or someone - to examine? He didn't even seem to consider that she might have a life outside of work.

And she didn't. How could she? Whenever he called, she ran.

Scully shook her head at herself. It was time to stop running. She moved her thumb over to the other side and hit the red button. Then, she took a deep breath as she let the phone drop back into her handbag. What a relief. Now she was free to enjoy her weekend as much as possible. When she turned to look out at the water, a snow goose fled from the approaching boat with lots of paddling and splashing. The bird took off and rose up into the air where the vessel couldn't follow, and Scully soon lost track of its white dot against the cerulean sky.

Its color reminded her of the white pencil on Mulder's desk, and a tourist in the first row threw her a perplexed look at her annoyed huff.

* * *

Mulder stared at the phone in his hands. The display should have been alight, but it was dark, only showing the name of the cellphone provider where it should have said SCULLY instead. The silence of the weekend hung in the office like a heavy, suffocating cloud.

She'd hung up on him. No "The caller you're trying to reach is not available at the moment. Please try again later." She'd been aware that he'd been calling her, and she hadn't wanted to talk to him.

Not even to tell him it was not a good time for her right now.

Maybe she was on a date? Mulder tamped down on the images the thought brought about in combination with "not a good time for a phone call". She deserved to have a good time, and he had no right whatsoever to judge her if she did.

Spending the day in the sun had lost its appeal. He didn't really have the time to just hang out anyway - he should probably drive to Baltimore this afternoon to ensure that he didn't leave his source waiting. After all, he needed to find out where he was going to meet him beforehand.

After all, he wouldn't miss anything important around here.

* * *

Left without a distraction, Scully's thoughts returned to this morning. Now that the shock of someone intruding into her apartment had worn off, she considered the events with a cold, logical mind.

Someone had stolen old library books that, given the amount of dust they'd gathered on their shelf, no one had shown an interest in in quite some time. Yet this someone hadn't wanted her to know what stood in those books, so there had to be information in there that was important to her case.

Scully let herself be hypnotized by the eddies forming along the bow wave and tried to recall what she'd retained from skimming through the three volumes.

She hadn't found mentions of any other treatments than surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, but then she'd only read the beginning of the first volume.

However, nasopharyngeal cancer could be experimentally induced. She'd gathered as much from looking over the chapter titles in volume three, also that there were several different ways to create these abnormal growths. The described mechanisms might have offered clues as to how to treat the resulting tumors. However, she'd fallen asleep before she'd gotten around to reading any of the actual chapters, and again, she was left without anything specific to try.

Broad would have to do then. All which had been done to identify her type of tumor so far had been the X-ray imaging. Cancer was a disease caused by changes in the genome of a cell, and she recalled Dr. Scanlon mentioning p53. She remembered that p53 was a tumor suppressor gene, sometimes even called the guardian of the genome. Scanlon might have mentioned it as a distraction, or there might have been a grain of truth in the web of lies he'd spun about his treatment. Since Scully had nothing better to go on, she decided to start her search there.

The confined space on the Matthew Hayes that had promised protection and safety now made her restless. She needed to get back to the hospital and into the lab after a quick trip back to her apartment, where the blood-soaked tissue from yesterday night still lay in the bin. How far were they away from the shore?

Scully looked up and couldn't believe her eyes. The Matthew Hayes had taken course for a dock on the other side of the river. She hadn't come here by boat in years and had lost all sense of time staring at the water, but she was almost certain that she knew where they were going to land. The building of the Torpedo Factory Arts center was distinctive enough for her to remember.

Sure enough, the speakers crackled, and the next stop was announced.

Alexandria.

She'd ended up on a boat going to Alexandria. Where Mulder lived.

* * *

At this pace, he was never going to get home. Driving to Alexandria hadn't taken as long as usual since it was Saturday. However, the whole city seemed to be on its way to the waterfront. The sidewalk and the pedestrian crossings were crawling with parents and their kids, strollers, grandparents, big family dogs, and couples holding hands.

Mulder had to wait for a boy on rollerblades to stalk across the street at the hand of an elderly woman. He tried to figure out who was holding whom up while they passed in front of his car, but failed. The moment the duo reached the sidewalk, he released the brake, only to have to hit it again for a tail-wagging Golden Retriever bolting across the street in pursuit of the two errant members of his flock. Mulder took a deep breath, looked left and right and left and right again just to be sure, and continued on his slow way to his empty apartment.

* * *

Scully couldn't wait to get on shore, and yet she dreaded seeing the buildings at the riverside grow bigger as the ship drew closer. Again, she was the first passenger to cross the gangway, but once on land, she made straight for the steps leading to the street behind the buildings at the waterfront while she called for a cab.

She only had to wait for a few minutes, but she felt uncomfortable standing around on the sidewalk in Alexandria after not accepting Mulder's call. That he came down here where all you could do was have a good time was unlikely though, and she relaxed.

"To Georgetown, please," she told the driver once she'd gotten into the cab. Now that she had a plan, getting home and then to the lab at Georgetown University Hospital couldn't happen quickly enough, but the cab got stuck in the traffic of a sunny Saturday afternoon. They were moving at a snail's pace, and she had ample time to distract herself from the slow going by watching droves of people mill about on their way to the waterfront.

A young boy wearing rollerblades lay crying on the sidewalk, and an older lady - maybe his granny - was trying to help him up. She seemed to have a hard time bending down to the boy, especially since a big, worried Golden Retriever was getting in her way. Scully considered telling the driver to stop so she could get out and help when a tall, dark-haired man ran up to the boy and kneeled down next to him. From her first glimpse at him, Scully had been convinced the man had been Mulder, out for an afternoon jog. However, when the cab started moving again, she saw that his profile was the same as the boy's and not Mulder's before she lost sight of them both.

* * *

The first thing he saw when he opened the door to his apartment were the crumpled pants lying in front of the sofa. The orange juice had dried and turned the fabric into a stiff, sticky mess. Mulder grimaced as he picked them up and dropped them on the heap of dirty clothes in front of the washing machine. He'd have to take care of that once he got back from Baltimore.

Now, however, he needed to find the keychain. Since he apparently hadn't lost it at the office or on his way home, he must still have had it in his pocket when he entered the apartment.

He'd gone to the kitchen. Mulder took a look around, but the floor in here was clear save for the pile of clothes with the pants on top. He'd already checked those, so where else could he search?

The sofa! He'd sat on the sofa wearing the pants before he'd gotten rid of them. The keychain might have fallen into the cracks and disappeared between the cushions. Mulder ran to the living room and began to tear the sofa apart.

He found nothing but crumbs, sunflower hulls, dust and a dried out pen.

Mulder stared at the mess in defeat. He wasn't even able to hold on to something as simple as a lifeless object. How could he ever hope to help Scully cling to her life? How could he hope not to lose her too? Anger at himself shot through his heart and made him hurl the cushion in his hands at the couch. The pen clattered to the floor, and Mulder kicked it against the wall on his way to the closet where he kept his overnight bag.

Going to Baltimore and finding out what the caller guy had to say was the least he could do for his partner.

* * *

How weird to be analyzing one's own sample in a pathology lab. The bleak light in the tiled room made the prospect even more drab. Yet the result of this test might turn out to be the beacon of hope that led her out of this ever-narrowing tunnel.

Scully added the DNA she'd extracted from the bloody tissue she'd used to blow her nose the night before to the mixture she'd prepared and started the sequencing reaction.

Now she had two hours to kill before she could transfer the sample to the DNA sequencer which would record the succession of the four different bases or "letters" in her TP53 gene over night.

Taking a break made her realize how much the events of the day had drained her. She'd been feeling woozy for a while, but she'd continued working because she wanted to be able to analyze the data the following day.

After all, she didn't have any time to spare and nothing better to do on her birthday anyway.

She put away the reagents and decontaminated the bench she'd worked on. Scully was hungry, and her legs were getting wobbly. She tried to recall the last time she'd eaten anything while she put the trash away and was surprised to find that at least twenty-four hours had elapsed since. Determined to have a proper meal, she went down to the hospital cafeteria.

The air there was even warmer than in the rest of the overheated hospital. It was saturated with the flat, yet pungent smell of overcooked vegetables, gravy that came out of a box, and weak, watered-down coffee. Scully took in the assortment of white rice, noodles that were cold enough to make the oily film covering them opaque, sickly green peas, and dried-out chicken thighs and opted for a banana.

She devoured it in the time it took her to ride the elevator back up to the lab. Not a good idea. Still, her thoughts were already less jumbled, and her stomach would settle. She took her lab coat off the hook and pulled the heavy door open. Once she'd finished transferring the samples to the DNA sequencer, she'd go home and order some pizza. And some ice cream.

Pizza had sounded like a good idea until she'd picked up the first slice and, upon taking a hearty bite, had felt warm, thick blood drip from her nose. It plopped into a sea of bright red tomato sauce, and Scully lost all appetite.

She sat on her couch with a tissue pressed to her nose as the floor seemed to drop out from under her yet again. Her life was a never-ending string of obstacles, and whenever she'd climbed over one, she found herself in front of the next. Even the simple, easy things weren't simple anymore.

Like eating pizza.

She couldn't stand looking at the caricature of her dinner any longer. As soon as the bleeding stopped, she stripped off her clothes, put on her pajamas, and went to bed. She'd held on to dutifully brushing her teeth the past two weeks despite how futile an effort it now seemed to be, but today she just couldn't muster the willpower. In a fit of childishness, she pulled the covers over her head, leaving only a small opening through which to breathe, and hid from the world. The dull silence of her cocoon breathed loneliness, so she pushed the covers back.

The trees in front of the window were rustling in the evening breeze. They reminded her of the room in her childhood home that she'd shared with Melissa and the sounds she'd used to hear before she'd fallen asleep. Heavy footsteps and the muted droning of a male voice. A female voice, responding. Mulder at his desk at the office, leaning on his hands, looking down at something, speaking. Pencils scattered across the desk, Mulder's, Melissa's, a rainbow of colors.

What do you think, Scully, which one is best?

Best for what, Mulder?

Best for taking notes. For profiles, for X-Files.

But Mulder, it doesn't matter which one you use.

Yes it does, Scully. I can feel it.

Mulder's eyes, intent, eager to hear her response.

What do you need the colors for?

I don't need them.

A bouquet of pencils with orange varnish in the pencil holder on Mulder's desk. A lone white coloring pencil left behind is a tulip, swaying on its stem in the already hot, humid air of a spring morning at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

Someone - man, middle-aged - claiming he'd been attacked by a murderous, carnivorous pitcher plant. His flushed face, the red blotches and his dilated pupils which had indicated the ingestion of drugs or, given the surroundings of poisonous plants.

Murky, sandy water in an otherwise empty spot of a bog.

Mulder's voice. Three feet high, you say? And it was still here this morning?

Yes, yes it was. Saw it with my own eyes.

His big, black pupils.

And yet, Mulder's "I told you so" look.

Mulder, he's hallucinating. We need a toxicological analysis of his blood.

Results postponed again and again; time trickling through the heat like thick syrup.

A sweet scent: a snowball bush leaning over a bench, its round white blossoms nodding in the air rising from the scorching hot walkway. Sweating in its shade, waiting.

Mulder, looking up at her in surprised affection after finding an iced tea in the lunch bag she'd brought him.

No chocolate cookie in her own paper bag. Where had she left it? Too hot to go back anyway. Restless waiting, annoyance. No sugar to take off the edge.

Feet hurting. Yet another motel room, but who cares - still work to do after fetching the toxicological report from the coroner's office. So many questions, so little answers.

It's dark, but it's cool. Light switch… next to the door.

Gravity pulled at Scully, drawing her out of her dream. She opened her eyes. The bedroom was dark, but back then in the motel, she'd turned on the light and had stopped cold next to the worn desk by the door to adsorb the still life in front of her.

A Sno Ball, sitting on her nightstand as if it had always been there. There had been no note, but she hadn't needed one.

Her knees had gone weak as warmth had spread under her skin. When she'd become aware of the touched, affectionate smile spreading on her face, she'd kicked off her shoes and had thrown herself on the bed to read the report. They were here to work, and Mulder had brought her a treat after a long, hot and tiring day, like any good colleague would do, and now she'd do her share too.

But page after confusing page, she'd seen the red cake out of the corner of her eye. When she'd reached the annex summarizing all the lab results that she couldn't make any sense of, she'd thrown the report aside and had buried her face in the quilt covering her bed.

 _You can't blame gravity for falling in love._

Einstein's mischievous grin from the famous photo had appeared before her inner eye unasked, just like the quote that she'd come across over ten years ago while doing literature research for her thesis.

Her head had shot up, and a knothole in the wooden headboard had replaced the physicist's wild, white hair and mocking tongue, but it hadn't been able to swallow the truth in his statement.

She'd rolled onto her back, and while she'd lain there, motionless, with her arms spread out beside her, she had tried to let go of the tension in her shoulders. Her limbs had grown heavy as gravity had pulled them into the mattress further and further.

She'd fallen, but she hadn't been able to say when she'd first stumbled. Hitting the ground - a moment she'd feared even while pretending to be able to fly - had felt like being caught and held by a good friend.

It had been a good feeling.

Still was.

There'd been nothing that she'd been able to give in return except her best work, so she'd allowed herself only a few more seconds of floating around in the contentment of her reverie before she'd hoisted herself up and had reached for the report to try to get to the bottom of their current case before the night ended.

So much time had elapsed since then - almost a whole year - yet it had passed as quickly as the petal falling from tulips her mom had brought in an attempt to brighten her days. It hit the nightstand with a light thud, the coda to its symphony.

The image of the Sno Ball still hung in her mind like a cobweb, the dew drops glistening in the sunlight of an early morning. The lonely reality of her birthday was so bleak that keeping this bright memory close to her heart was a safe endeavor. She allowed herself a few heartbeats to hold on to her dreamscape before she acknowledged her surroundings.

The fallen petal was a vibrant red, but in a few short hours, the color would fade. If she could only stop time, halt it as long as it took her to regain her health. Or at the very least, long enough to live some more, to soak up experiences, even those she'd never considered important enough and those she'd saved for an elusive later time.

However, there was no emergency stop button in life, so her only chance to win this race against time was to hurry. She considered changing out of the crumpled, mismatched clothes she'd worn the day before and decided against the effort of choosing something new. No one would see yesterday's clothes under the lab coat, and people with a normal life didn't spend a sunny weekend in the lab if they didn't have to.

The humming of the machines had always been a comfort to Scully in its steadiness, but now it seemed to her like a pretense that nothing had changed when everything had.

What she was seeing didn't make any sense.

Most of it, anyway.

The sequencing of the DNA sample from the blood on her tissue had worked. She could deduce as much from the series of peaks displayed on the computer screen, each in one of four different colors that corresponded to one of the four different bases that were the building blocks of DNA.

But there should only have been one peak in each position, not several. A second peak here and there would have made sense, but this... this was an unidentifiable mess.

Scully closed the file and double-clicked on the next sample. She'd performed the analysis several times, just to be sure. It looked the same. So did the third one, only that the recorded sequence - or rather sequences - broke off much earlier.

She sorted the sequences from longest to shortest length and aligned them, hoping to find a consistent pattern to where they ended. There didn't seem to be one, and Scully sat back and stared at the nonsensical zig-zag lines on the screen.

But then, a pattern emerged.

There seemed to be gaps in some of the sequences. The middle part was missing from some of the overlapping lines of genetic code.

She looked closer. They all lacked the same segment.

How could this be? Why would the reaction stop prematurely in some cases, but not in the others?

She didn't think she had done anything wrong, but if the reaction itself had worked, then something must have stopped it.

Something that couldn't be processed.

Something that didn't belong there.

Something alien.

That was a thought she better forgot as quickly as it had sprung to mind, since it couldn't be possible.

She'd probably still been preoccupied with what had happened in the morning when she'd been here yesterday. She'd hurried, and she'd been hypoglycemic when she'd performed the analysis. If she had made any mistakes, she probably wouldn't even remember them.

Scully sat back and relaxed her grip on the mouse.

She must have done something wrong after all, since it was the only explanation that made sense. It also meant that she'd worked for several hours both yesterday and today for nothing. Against her hopes, her efforts hadn't brought her any closer to a cure. Instead, she'd wasted most of her weekend including the morning of her birthday in here, surrounded by machines and their relentless, soulless humming.

The overwhelming need to talk to someone overcame Scully, and she shut down the computer and made her way to the locker room. She pulled her phone out of her bag before she'd even taken off her lab coat.

After punching in the PIN, she paused. Her first thought had been to call Mulder. He would have listened without judging her for trying to find answers using science, even if his approach was different. However, she'd ignored him the last time he'd wanted to talk to her.

He'd probably only called because he'd needed something, Scully told herself.

You don't know that.

That's why he always calls, isn't it?

You're only thinking about calling him because you need him, too.

The truth of that thought hit her hard. She wasn't any better than him in this regard.

Scully scrolled down in the list of contacts until she came to the names starting with "M" and hit the call button.

* * *

Mulder checked his watch.

Again.

His source was already forty-three minutes late, and his legs were getting tired from standing around on the hard concrete floor of the abandoned warehouse. While the day was bright and sunny, it was still only February, and the cold air seemed to hide out in the dark corners, waiting to suck the warmth out of anybody who dared to leave the protection of the warm rays outside.

Save for the greasy smell of used motor oil and two stained cardboard boxes, the room was empty. His hands linked together behind his back, Mulder shifted his weight to the other foot, then thought it foolish to stand around as if he were waiting for someone on a busy sidewalk and decided to check out the perimeter of the room once more. Except for an oversized, well-worn black plastic lever and a round red emergency stop button on the wall next to the door, neither of which did anything - he'd checked - and the boxes - both empty, he'd checked those too - there was nothing. Not even a sound. No dripping faucet. No creaking door. Just... nothing.

And no one but himself.

And more time to think than he cared for. He started walking again.

Scully had been so angry on Friday. In a way, he understood why. Standing here, waiting, not being able to leave because abandoning this place would mean giving up on information on her case and yet not getting anywhere either - that's how he imagined she felt about having an illness without a known cure. Progression without progress. Due to her medical background, she knew exactly how dire her situation was. She hadn't only admitted it to herself, she'd told him as much. But back then, directly after her diagnosis, she'd been calm and collected. Maybe reality had finally caught up with her?

But why only now? And why couldn't he shake the feeling that she'd been angry at him and not at someone or something else?

When he arrived at the other wall, Mulder turned around and kept walking. Each of his slow steps echoed in the empty warehouse.

What had he done to upset her? He tried to recall the afternoon.

He'd been relieved when she'd come done to the office again. After all, he'd thought he'd already blown his chance to ask her about her plans for her birthday.

However, Scully had seemed so reserved from the moment he'd noticed her standing in the doorway that he hadn't had the guts to speak up. Instead, he'd hidden behind a file.

In retrospect, Scully must have thought he'd been ignoring her, or even worse, avoiding to talk to her. Mulder massaged his temples as he shook his head at himself. Why hadn't he said something, anything?

Well, he had, but not what he should have said. He'd come so close, but then he'd filled their precious time with smalltalk instead, and Scully had left in a huff.

Rightly so.

Why had he wasted their time like that?

He looked at his watch. 1:11pm. That guy should have been here over an hour ago. More than half of Scully's birthday was already over, and the self-professed source hadn't shown up or conveyed a message or anything else.

Maybe he didn't dare. Or maybe he'd never planned to actually turn up.

Mulder bit his lip. If he didn't believe what people said so readily, he wouldn't be wasting time in a clammy warehouse in Baltimore now. He was a gullible idiot.

With a few long steps, he was at the door. He shielded his eyes from the bright light and headed towards the side street where he'd parked his car.

* * *

"Happy birthday, Dana," Margaret said and kissed her on the cheek.

"Thanks, Mom."

Margaret took her coat and put it on a hanger. "Come on in, have a seat. I've already started the fire. We've always had one going on your birthday, remember?"

Scully sat down on the sofa in front of the fireplace while her mother prepared a tray with wine and glasses for them in the kitchen. Sitting in the living room and listening to the clinking rather than helping her made her feel like a guest in her mother's house, something she'd never experienced before. She leaned back against the cushions in an attempt to look relaxed, but her shoulders stayed tight, her hands knotted in her lap and her mind alert, ready to guard her emotions.

"How are you feeling, Dana?" Margaret asked as she set the tray with the opened bottle and two wine tumblers down on the coffee table.

"I'm fine, Mom."

Margaret straightened and raised her eyebrows at her. "You're always 'fine'. You don't have to be strong, you know that, don't you? We're here for you. I'm here for you!"

"I know, Mom." And she hated it. Yes, she needed support, but she needed support that left her strong, that made her want to fight. Not the pity she'd seen in her mother's eyes from the moment she'd burst into her room at the hospital, the pity that wanted her to cry and throw herself into her mother's arms.

"So how are you really? You can tell me, Dana." Margaret sat next to her and took her daughter's hand in hers. "Please, talk to me." Scully slipped it out of her grasp and reached for the bottle and a glass.

"I'm doing all right, I am," she said as she poured wine for them, red like the blood she'd wiped from her nose before leaving her apartment, where she'd changed into some fresh clothes. While she'd steeled herself for the overwhelming outpouring of care and offers to pray with her that she'd come to expect from her mother ever since she'd been diagnosed, she'd caught her reflection in the mirror, a trail of blood running from her nose to the lips she'd painted her favorite shade of red.

"Dana, I think you should talk to someone."

"Mom, please."

"No really, you should," Margaret said.

"I have," Scully said, hoping she'd made it sound casual enough to avoid further questions.

"To whom?"

Of course that hadn't worked.

"It doesn't matter," she said and handed her mother her glass. Yet the words she'd written while she'd been in the hospital had mattered to her.

"Yes, Dana, it does. I think you should talk to someone you trust, to someone who knows you."

When she'd first felt time running through her like sand through an hourglass, she'd poured her thoughts out to her partner in writing. Had created a ribbon of words tying her to him and, she hoped, through him to life.

She'd not meant for these thoughts to be read by anyone, and she would certainly not share them with her mother.

"Mom, I appreciate your concern, but I'd like to handle this my own way."

"Do you though? Appreciate how worried I am? You didn't even call me right away when you found out!" Margaret got louder with every word, and Scully shrunk into the cushions.

"I told Mulder to call you as soon as I was sure."

"This is what I don't understand, Dana. I like Fox. I do, and I appreciate that he gave me that call. I'm sure it wasn't easy for him, and you know why? Because it wasn't his call to make. You should have done it yourself. I'm your mother! I should have been there for you from the very beginning, but you didn't even let me know right away!"

Keeping her fears contained within herself every minute, every hour, every day was sucking any spare energy out of Scully, but she couldn't do more to retain some normalcy in her life. She could pinpoint the exact moment when the floodgates burst and frustration over the failed test and anxiety turned into anger burst out of her. She jumped up from the sofa.

"I told you I needed to get some answers first! I'm a doctor, I know what to do, which tests to run! I didn't need anyone else there for that, I can take care of myself!" she said as she her nails dug into the flesh of her balled fists.

Scully loved her mother, but she couldn't handle her mom's desperate attempt at recreating birthday traditions if it fell apart at the mere thought of her illness. She'd come here because she'd felt the need to talk to someone, but now she struggled to stay silent so her bottled up panic and rage wouldn't be unleashed.

* * *

Time had seemed to stretch into infinity this morning, but ever since Mulder had decided to go back to Washington, eternity had collapsed into a single moment.

So little time, and so much to do.

Mulder flinched when he realized that this was also true for Scully's life. He forced himself to focus on more practical matters. The keychain. Where was it? He'd looked all over his apartment. Still, it made the most sense for it to still be there somewhere.

He decided to search in the most likely spot again first and went straight to the sofa once he arrived at home.

There, under the middle cushion, the golden-rimmed locket shimmered up at him from a bed of dust, crumbs and sunflower shells. How had he not seen it before?

He'd have to think about that later. Mulder picked up the keychain and went over to the shelf where the aquarium stood. Last week, when he'd decided on giving Scully a present, he'd thought long and hard about what to give her. There had been so much he'd wanted it to convey...

How much he appreciated that she respected his way of searching for the truth despite their differing approaches, for one. She always listened to what he had to say. She always took the time to present arguments as to why she didn't believe in his explanations instead of outright dismissing them as crazy Spooky's wild theories that didn't warrant even hearing him out, as so many others had done.

In working with him, she'd sacrificed so much - her medical career, her reputation, the respect of her family and worst of all, her health. She'd once said that she was willing to put herself on the line for him, and she'd proven she meant it ever since, to the point where he wished she hadn't.

It had been an extraordinary moment in his life when she'd walked into his office for the first time and had embarked on a journey with him that took her far from her comfort zone in the universe of science and hurtled her into the realm of extreme possibilities. Up to that memorable day, he'd been alone in his search for the truth without ever realizing how badly he'd needed someone to share the burden of trying to explain the unexplained. He'd never even considered the possibility that he'd ever meet anyone trustworthy enough for that. Then, his life had taken a leap when Scully had shown him through her perseverance and hard work that she thought of them as a team working together in pursuit of the truth, even if that meant including his theories in her reports and stating to their superiors that she couldn't explain every aspect of their cases using science.

He wanted to show her how much it meant to him that she respected his work, that she respected him as a person - and how much he respected her for both. She'd soon become a constant in his life, and the thought of losing her hurt as if he were losing a part of himself that he'd not even been aware of, as if he could never be a whole person again without her.

Then one evening, he'd driven by the NASA headquarters, and he'd had an epiphany what to give her as her birthday present. As far back as he could remember, he'd been obsessed with space travel. When he'd been eight, he'd taken all his savings out of his piggy bank to buy an Apollo 11 keychain after he'd seen the moon landing. His father had explained to him that many, many people had worked together for a long time to make the mission possible, but back then, he hadn't been able to grasp what it had taken to get these three men up there.

Now, however, he also understood that while the whole was so much bigger than its parts, there would be no "whole" without every single one of them. He wouldn't ever have come this far in his pursuit of the truth if Scully hadn't become part of the team.

He also wouldn't be the man he was now without her.

However, no matter what happened, they still had the present, and Mulder was determined to make this birthday special for Scully through good memories.

He removed a glossy white cardboard box from the shelf below the aquarium where he'd kept it safe next to the Buddha statue since the night when he'd decided on his gift for Scully. He took the golden ribbon out and carefully placed the keychain in the box.

And then he realized that he hadn't wrapped any presents for anyone in so long that he had no idea how to tie the bow so it wouldn't look sloppy. He stood in front of his desk, the shining ribbon in one hand and the box on the table in front of him, and pondered his next move.

Time, Mulder. Time is running out.

He grabbed the present and ran out of the apartment.

His old neighbor - Mrs. Simmonds - unwound the woolen yarn she'd used to demonstrate how to tie a tidy bow. "Did you see how I did it? Now try for yourself."

She handed him the yarn, and he did his best to imitate her movements. By the third try, his bow was almost as neat as hers.

"Now go on, wrap your present. I'll hold down the knot for you."

Mulder adjusted the ribbon so that the shinier side was on the outside of the bow and pulled the knot tight.

"See? That wasn't so hard, was it?" Mrs. Simmonds asked. "It'll mean a lot to her that you wrapped the present yourself."

Mulder stared at her. He'd said he needed help wrapping a birthday present for a friend, nothing more.

"Close your mouth, it's getting cold in there. This is for your date, isn't it? Now shoo, get on your way. Don't hang around my apartment when you can be with her instead."

* * *

"Dana, I just want what's best for you."

Scully took a deep breath and unclenched her fists. "Mom, I am handling this, I'm not just sticking my head in the sand. I just do it in my own way."

She grabbed her glass from the coffee table in a desperate attempt to give this some semblance of her usual relaxed visits here. The swig of wine she took tasted metallic.

"But you need rest, Dana, rest and care! You shouldn't be running around chasing..." Margaret waved her hand in the air. "Whatever it is you're chasing. And getting yourself in even more danger!"

"I need to work, Mom. We've had this conversation several times," Scully forced out between her teeth and smacked the glass down on the table. Wine spilled over the rim and drenched her hand. "I can't just sit around and hope for the best!" she bit out as she yanked a tissue out of a box and patted her hand dry. In an attempt at finding a less aggressive outlet for her pent up anger, Scully started pacing up and down in front of the fire.

"I need to understand, Mom. At the very least, I want to know what I'm dealing with."

"But... you know, Dana. You know you have cancer."

Scully's toes dug into the fluff of the carpet as the blood rushed from her face and left her feeling cold. It was one thing to say it herself - as a doctor, she was used to talking about cancer. How often had she recorded her observations about abnormal growths she'd found during autopsies? Hearing it spoken aloud by anyone else, and by someone close to her, took the clinical aspect of the disease away and made it personal, made her the subject on the table.

The carpet rustled as Margaret followed her. The warmth of her mother's hand on her shoulder seeped through her blouse and into her skin, and the wall of ice she'd built around her heart began to melt. She turned towards her mom and swallowed as tears welled up in her eyes.

"I just don't want you to face this all by yourself," Margaret said and reached out for her. Scully hesitated, but then stepped into the circle of her mother's arms. She buried her face in her shoulder and breathed in the soothing, floral scent of the fabric softener which smelled like her childhood. As the heat of the fire warmed her back and her mother's comfort her heart, Scully exhaled and tried to let go of the tension in her knotted muscles.

* * *

Back in his apartment, Mulder made a beeline for his desk and dialed Scully's number. She didn't pick up, so he left her a message to call him back if she was home and went to wash off the smell of mold and motor oil clinging to his skin and clothes.

Then he tried to reach her while he toweled his hair dry. Again, nothing. He only laid down the phone long enough to put on a clean shirt. Not even two minutes had passed before he pressed the redial button, but just like before, the laconic "beep - pause - beep - pause - beep" wasn't interrupted by her voice.

Why wasn't Scully home on a Sunday evening? She always spent them on her couch reading when they weren't on the road. He knew. Him guessing the book of the week had become a Monday morning ritual just like thinking up titles that would make her roll her eyes at him had become his favorite weekend pastime.

He dialed her cellphone's number, jammed the phone between his ear and his shoulder, and buttoned his shirt while he was waiting for her to pick up.

During the twenty rings he gave her to hear her phone, get it out of her bag, and take his call, he also managed to pick out a tie and put it on.

On twenty-one, he hung up.

He forced himself to put on pants, socks, and the suit jacket before he dialed her number again.

The dissonant ringing tone merged with his growing concern. He disconnected the call and forced himself to calm down and think.

Did she still not want to talk to him? Or was she simply somewhere where she didn't pay attention to her cell phone? Where would she have gone?

Off on her own investigation into her illness? No, not on her birthday, and she'd have taken her cellphone with her if she had.

So where would she want to be on this special day?

Mulder pulled into the driveway in front of Mrs. Scully's house. To his relief, Scully's car was there. Her mother was the anchor tying her to her old life, a safe heaven in the search for the truth, so of course she'd come here on this sad, special birthday.

He was determined to bring some light and enjoyment in Scully's life, even if he could only do so just this once.  
In his haste, he shut the car door on his coat, which pulled him to an undignified stop after only one and a half steps. He rolled his eyes at himself, unlocked the car, yanked the fabric free, and threw the door shut with more force than necessary. The sound echoed in the lazy quietness of the late Sunday afternoon.

Mulder rapped on the door and adjusted the coat which was still hanging off his right shoulder. Then, he felt for the white box in its pocket. The smooth cardboard anchored him and made him more nervous at the same time.

"Oh, I didn't know you were coming! What a great surprise!" Margaret stepped aside and held the door open for him. "Come on in, Fox. We were just about to have coffee and cake."

"Thanks," Mulder said as he passed her on his way in.

"Who is it, Mom?" he heard Scully ask from the living room just as he saw her reflection in the gold-framed mirror in the entry hall.

"Dana, Fox is here," Margaret answered as she closed the door.

Scully's surprised gaze met Mulder's in the mirror. As he turned around to her, she asked, "What's going on?"

"Um, nothing?" Mulder said.

Margaret disappeared into the kitchen, and Scully moved closer to Mulder. "What is it?" She whispered just loud enough for him to hear her over the clatter of crockery.

"Nothing. Really."

Mulder could tell Scully didn't believe him just by the deep crease that appeared above the bridge of her nose, and he couldn't blame her.

In a normal volume, she said: "Let me take that coat for you."

"Thank you, but I can handle that," Mulder replied and took the hanger from her. He concealed the present in the coat pocket by hanging the garment into the wardrobe with the right side facing the wall.

When he turned back to Scully, she'd raised her eyebrows at him. Great. Of course she didn't believe that his coming here had nothing to do with monsters, aliens, or conspiracies.

She was waiting for an explanation, so he started out: "I just wanted to..."

"Coffee's ready!" Margaret passed them as she carried a tray with three coffee cups, plates, and a cheesecake to the living room.

Scully gave Mulder a long look before she followed her mother to the dining table.

* * *

Scully was aware of Mulder's presence behind her as they entered the living room, so she busied herself by helping her mom set the table.

"Fox, would you mind bringing the coffee over from the kitchen? It didn't fit on the tray."

"Sure, Mrs. Scully."

Scully watched as Mulder disappeared again. When she turned back to the napkin she'd been folding, she caught her mother watching her from across the table and raised her eyebrows at her in a silent question. Her mom averted her gaze and pretended to focus on the perfect placement of a saucer and a cup next the plate she'd set out in front of her. Was she... smiling?

Scully couldn't be sure, because her mom left the table and headed towards the side table next to the lamp in the adjoining room. Mulder appeared with the coffee just when she turned around with the candle she'd picked up there in her hands, and Scully was struck by the similarity of their positions to almost a year earlier - herself next to the dinner table and her mother's body shielding Mulder's. Shame rose up in her as she remembered holding Mulder at gunpoint in her mom's house, and her cheeks started to burn with embarrassment.

Mulder focused his intent gaze on her. The creases of focus and worry on his forehead vanished as his face relaxed in understanding.

"Um, Mrs. Scully, where do you want me to put this?" he asked.

Her mom turned around to him, and the spell was broken. Scully took a deep breath, hoping to calm her racing heart.

After Mulder had handed the coffee pot off to her mom, he walked over to her side of the table. She felt the warmth of his hand on her back for a fleeting moment as he passed her. Then he pulled out the chair to her left, and Scully was glad to have a moment to collect herself while her mom poured the coffee.

Then she noticed that Mulder still hadn't sat down. She looked at him over her shoulder, and he smiled at her, his hands on the backrest. It dawned on her that he was waiting for her to sit down. Scully let go of the napkin and moved over, hoping that her mom hadn't caught wind of the strange little interlude. The candle flickered to light in front of her, and she was thankful for the smoke rising from the match that obscured the confusion in her eyes from her mother's view.

* * *

Mrs. Scully cut the cheesecake, and Mulder took Scully's plate and held it while her mom placed a big slice on it. Scully's questioning gaze burned into his side.

"Happy Birthday," he said and gave her an extra wide, silly grin as he set down the cake in front of her.

A smile tugged at her lips which she hid by looking down at the napkin she was placing in her lap. She flattened it with her hands and said: "Thanks."

A weight lifted of Mulder's shoulders. Scully didn't seem to be angry at him anymore, and he'd even managed to brighten her mood a bit.

The fire crackled as the scent of fresh coffee enveloped them. Clouds that had obscured the low-hanging sun passed and winter afternoon light filled the living room, giving Scully's hair a warm red glow. Mulder took in the moment, relishing it and burning its bittersweet memory in his mind at the same time.

Scully reached for her fork and the movement pulled Mulder out of his thoughts. He turned towards his own plate and caught Mrs. Scully smiling at them over the rim of her cup.

"The cake looks delicious, Mrs. Scully," he tried to divert her attention.

"Yeah, it's very good, as always," Scully mumbled around a big piece of it.

"Thank you," Mrs. Scully said as she set down her cup and took some cake herself. "It's an old family recipe."

Silence fell as they sat at the imposing table that always seemed a bit too formal to Mulder, punctuated only by the clinking of metal and china.

To hell with it.

He turned to Scully.

"You shouldn't eat too much though."

She frowned up at him and stopped chewing, her fork poised in the air. Then she swallowed and asked:

"Care to explain why?"

"Because..." He wasn't going to muck this up again by not going through with it, so he took a deep breath and said: "I was thinking about inviting you to dinner tonight. If you want, that is, of course."


	3. Chapter 3

Scully's thoughts unravelled into numerous threads as the familiar fabric of her world dissolved. Surely he couldn't have meant it the way it had sounded? Everything Mulder did had to do with his work, was motivated by his search for the truth. Would he ever consider putting that aside even for the length of a dinner?

She tried to imagine Mulder and herself without a case to talk about. The notion of a mute Mulder and her staring at each other across a table, at a loss for words, was so strange she started to chuckle.

Scully caught the hopeful look in Mulder's eyes falling away before he turned back to his plate.

"Uh, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have..." he started and dug into his cake.

"No, no, it's fine. I'd like that," Scully interrupted him, and he glanced at her in surprise. She saw that he was guarding himself against any flicker of hope lest it turned into a roaring fire, as it had so often before, and smiled at him.

"That would be very nice."

He nodded. "Good."

Out of the corner of her eye, Scully saw her mother smiling at them.

And Mulder, following her gaze as always, noticed it too. They shared a glance and turned back to their cakes in unison.

* * *

"So, Fox, where will you be taking Dana for dinner?" Mrs. Scully asked with fond curiosity as she laid her fork down on her empty plate.

Mulder glanced up at her, but in doing so, he saw her daughter next to him rolling her eyes at the crumbs on her plate.

"Oh, just where we always go," he said, hoping to convey a nonchalance he didn't feel.

He knew he'd misstepped when Scully stopped trying to pile as many pieces of the crumbled crust on her fork as possible and raised her head to look at her mother.

"So you go out for dinner often? That's lovely! Dana never told me," Mrs. Scully said, her voice sweeter than the cake.

After a beat of awkward silence, Scully said, "Yeah, Mom, actually I think we should be going. It's getting rather late." She dropped her fork on the plate, and crumbs of cheesecake crust bounced across the table and into Mulder's lap.

"But Dana, it's only half past four."

"Well, we always go there at five. After work," she added with emphasis as she dropped the balled up napkin on her plate.

"Always" was a bit of a stretch, but they sometimes grabbed a bite at the pub around the corner from the FBI. Mulder cleared his throat and stood. "She's right, we should be leaving. Thank you for the coffee and for the excellent cake," he said as he helped Scully out of her chair.

"You're welcome, Fox." Mrs. Scully smiled at him as they passed her, and he saw Scully's back tense.

They put on their coats in silence while Mrs. Scully watched. Scully went to hug her mom, and Mulder stood by the door, the hands in the pockets of his coat.

Mrs. Scully took her daughter by the shoulders, looked her in the eyes and said: "Enjoy your evening, Dana, okay?"

Mulder pretended he hadn't heard and opened the door for Scully. He let her pass and turned to her mother.

"Goodbye, Mrs. Scully. Thanks for everything."

"Bye, Fox."

Mulder could feel her gaze on their backs as he followed Scully down the path to the driveway. Once they'd passed a few bushes obscuring them from the house, the door clicked shut, and Scully breathed a sigh of relief in front of him. She pulled her coat tight around herself and turned around to face him.

"Sorry about that," she said with a slight, embarrassed smile.

"It's ok," Mulder said. "But I've only booked us a table for half past eight. So what do we do now?"

* * *

Scully was relieved to be out of her mother's house and out from under her watchful, if well-meaning, gaze. She shook herself and took a deep breath of the cool, fresh air.

Taking a walk would be great, she thought. Then she tried to picture Mulder on a leisurely stroll without a purpose, but the image morphed into the determined, worried Mulder she knew before she could even try to hold on to it. A smile tugged at her lips, and she shook her head - at him or at herself, she didn't know.

"What is it, Scully?"

"Um, nothing," Scully said, but the image of a sullen Mulder being dragged on a walk was still stuck on her mind and her smile grew wider and wider.

As her face lit up, so did Mulder's, and soon they were both giggling, then laughing. At themselves, about each other, about her mom...

It was good to see Mulder this relaxed for once, just as it was a relief to be laughing herself.

Scully wiped the tears from her eyes and caught enough breath to say, "I'm glad you're here, Mulder."

His expression turned earnest and he picked up the cross pendant around her neck. "Me too," he said as he held it up and caught a ray of afternoon sunlight with it.

"Maybe... I was thinking, we could take a walk before dinner. If you want," he said as if it were the most normal thing to ask her as he let the pendant glide through his hand and then let go of it.

Scully looked up from the cross in surprise. "I'd love to! Really, Mulder?"

"Sure," he said, now looking a bit flustered.

"Well then, where do we go?"

"I'll drive," Mulder said and and took out his car keys. "It's a surprise."

* * *

Scully scowled at him over the top of the car. "Promise me we won't accidentally stumble across one of your cases."

Mulder let go of the door handle and straightened. "Am I really that bad?"

Scully's smug, wry smile told him everything he didn't want to know. She disappeared from his view as she entered the car and threw the door shut behind herself.

Oh well. Today would be different. Today was all about Scully and her birthday.

* * *

As far as she could tell, they were heading towards the FBI headquarters. If Mulder had been winding her up about surprising her and took them to the office instead, Scully would kill him.

She shot him a sideways glance, and he looked over at her.

"You don't believe I'm not dragging you to a case, do you?" Mulder asked as he turned his eyes back to the road.

"Mulder, I want to believe, but I'm not sure I should."

"Always the skeptic."

"As long as there's no proof that we're not going to dig through old X-files instead of going for a walk, I'm going to assume that we'll do just that," Scully said, and settled back in her seat with her arms crossed and her lips set into a wry line.

"And on what do you base that completely unfounded assumption, Agent Scully?"

"Experience, Agent Mulder. Four long years of experience."

Mulder grinned at her as if he'd just made a joke only he could understand. She furrowed her eyebrows at him in a silent question, and his smile grew even wider. He turned his attention back to the road. She followed his gaze -

And it hit her. They'd passed the FBI just as she'd been so smug about her experience in working with him and were now heading further north.

* * *

Mulder buried his hands in his coat pockets. They'd left the car at a trailhead in Rock Creek Park and were walking along the river. Scully had fallen behind, and when he stopped hearing her steps rustle in last fall's leaves, he turned around. She was standing still, facing the river, and taking deep, slow breaths.

He retraced his steps. Scully's eyes were closed, but when a twig cracked under his weight, she opened them. A breeze smelling like humid earth warmed by a sunny spring day lifted a strand of her hair into the dwindling sunlight.

She didn't say anything, but kept looking at the river, so Mulder asked: "What is it, Scully?"

"I was just thinking that we use science to understand nature, but that sometimes, we get so lost trying to figure things out that we stop noticing them."

Mulder stood next to her and followed her gaze, tried to see what she was seeing. A branch hung into the water, and where the divided current met its sibling, they swirled in ever-changing eddies before they combined back into a single stream.

"I was in Baltimore this weekend," he said.

The gurgling of the water filled the silence between them until Scully turned to him and furrowed her brow at him.

"Sorry, what?"

Mulder closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

He opened them and said, "I was trying to figure things out."

* * *

"I don't understand," Scully said as she looked up at Mulder. She only saw his profile since his facial expression was obscured by the shadow of a tree growing at the river's edge.

He turned and took a step towards her. The light from the low-hanging sun illuminated his face, and specks of green shimmered in his eyes.

"I had this source. Or at least that's what I thought he was until I came to the meeting point and he didn't show up," Mulder said.

Scully frowned at him. They weren't working on any particular case at the moment - they'd just finished the paperwork on the last one - so what did he so desperately need information on that he drove to Baltimore for it during the weekend? And why hadn't he called her if whichever lead he was following was that important?

"A source for what, Mulder?" Scully asked. Even as she did so, she shook her head at herself for getting into a case not only on the weekend, but on her birthday. However, her curiosity had gotten the better of her already, so there was no point in rowing back now.

Mulder stared over her shoulder at a point behind her while he sighed.

"You're a medical doctor, Scully," he said as he shifted his gaze to her eyes. "Baltimore rings a bell, doesn't it?"

The Johns Hopkins University hospital. Scully understood what Mulder had been after, and a slew of emotions and words tripped over themselves as they bubbled up her throat.

So she watched, open-mouthed, as Mulder turned with a defeated sigh and stomped down the trail, his shoulders hunched.

* * *

Mulder heard her steps behind him - quick thumps on the ground, getting louder and closer, until he felt her arm brush his as she caught up with him.

"Mulder... I don't know what to say."

He didn't either, so he kept walking while her breathing filled the silence. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her looking at the ground. She was biting her lip, and there was a deep crease on her forehead.

She raised her gaze, focused on a point in the far distance and said: "I was also trying to figure something out."

When she slowed to a stop, so did he. A small white cloud was passing over them, and its reflection made Scully's eyes appear a very light grey. After a few beats of silence, she met his gaze and spoke.

"I analyzed the sequence of one of my genes. TP53, the one Dr. Scanlon had been talking about." Just hearing Scanlon's name made Mulder angry, and he scowled.

"Mulder, I know Scanlon was making things worse, was maybe even killing these women, but that's a tumor suppressor gene. Maybe there was some truth intertwined with all his lies."

With some reluctance, he agreed and nodded.

"What did you find?" He asked. Maybe she'd come across one piece of the puzzle they were trying to solve - something that allowed them a glimpse of what they were dealing with.

By the defeated look in Scully's eyes, he knew she hadn't.

"Nothing," she said. "It didn't work."

* * *

Scully had witnessed hazel excitation deflate into ashen hopelessness many times before, but the transition had never been quite as quick and all-encompassing as today. She couldn't bear to see her own feelings reflected in Mulder's gaze and lowered her head. One of last year's beech leaves had fallen on the trail and had been worn down so that only a web of vascular strands had been left behind, and Scully picked it up and spread it out in the palm of her hand. The interconnected fibers felt soft and delicate when she ran her fingertips over it, but while the webbing yielded to her touch, it didn't break, but sprung back.

"You tried, Scully," Mulder said, and when she didn't look up because she was trying to swallow her despair, he wrapped his hand around hers and flattened the leaf with a stroke of his thumb.

"We'll both keep trying," he added.

The warmth of his hand brought her back to the river, and Scully nodded. She knew he was speaking the truth: he'd never stop trying, and neither would she.

When she looked up at him, he let go of her hand, but she wrapped her fingers and with it the leaf around his thumb and gave it a quick, thankful squeeze before she turned to lead the way back to the car.

* * *

The beech leaf tumbled to the ground at Mulder's feet as he looked after Scully's retreating form. Her coat swayed from side to side as she walked down the path, her hair glowing copper in the evening light.

He bent down and picked the leaf back up. The intricate net was still intact despite so many people treading on it, despite the elements putting it through the wringer during the winter. He took in the many connections, the multitude of possible paths.

One universe, many outcomes.

With the leaf in one pocket and the white box with the keychain in the other, he followed his partner.


End file.
